Apple faces an interesting conundrum with its iPads: the older ones are good enough for most people, who in turn keep them until they're no longer supported and don't buy new ones.
Nevertheless, Apple hasn't given up hope, and the new iPad Pro 10.5-inch is best tablet the company has produced by a long margin.
As an aside, there's also a new iPad Pro with a 12.9-inch screen. Which of these two should you pick? My take: get the smaller iPad Pro for portability and general computing work, and as a laptop replacement (yes, it can be that).
The more expensive bigger 12.9-inch model is good for drawing, video and image editing, and if you have an app in which you use multiple fingers. In that case, sacrificing some portability in favour of a larger screen size makes sense.
Back to the smaller iPad Pro: physically, growing the iPad Pro from a 9.7-inch screen (measured diagonally) to a 10.5-inch one doesn't sound like much.
The added screen area provides a fifth more pixels, but the 10.5-inch iPad Pro isn't that much bigger than the 9.7-inch model. A thinner bezel for the screen meant the case didn't have to grow much, and the weight only increased a little.
However, the new Retina screen is not just bigger, but much brighter at 600 nits. It provides 2224 by 1668 pixel resolution, wide colour P3 gamut, and True Tone technology.
What's more, the new iPad Pro is equipped with a variable refresh rate display. This sounds a bit geeky, but it's very clever: the display can refresh as fast as 120 times a second, for fluid, judder-free animations and much less delay when you draw with the Pencil on it.
The display can also adjust the refresh rate down, to save battery, or for movies so you get 24, 48 or 96 frames per second, which will make Peter Jackson who loves those things weep with joy no doubt.
Until more apps become available that support the variable refresh rate become available, it's a bit hard to demonstrate the difference it makes. Suffice to say, the screen on the iPad Pro 10.5-inch is fantastic, the best Apple has come up with on any device.
iPad Pro 10.5-inch next to the 9.7-inch model. Photo / Juha Saarinen
One thing I liked with the new size was having a slightly bigger Smart Keyboard: the one that fits the 9.7-inch model feels a tad too cramped for my hands, and the 10.5-inch Smart Keyboard is nicer to type on.
The Smart Keyboard for the 10.5-inch iPad Pro has been tweaked with better key action too - it's pricey at $259, but you'll want a physical keyboard to make the most of the iPad Pro.
Also, the Smart Keyboard is slim enough to fit into the new leather sleeve, which has holder for the Apple Pencil. If you add those, that's another $229 and $159, bringing the total to $647 for the accessories. Ouch.
Talking of money, the iPad Pro 10.5-inch starts at $1099 including GST, for the 64GB model. You might get by with that, if you use cloud storage and a fast network; the next tier is 256GB, which ups the price to $1259 (prices for Wi-Fi iPad Pros only; LTE broadband adds $220 to the cost).
iPad Pro 10.5-inch with the Apple Pencil and saddle leather sleeve. Photo / Juha Saarinen
My review device was the top of the line 512GB model with Wi-Fi and LTE which costs $1,799, which if you consider the cost of accessories as per above points to the 256GB model being the best value.
Much faster hardware in the 10.5-inch iPad Pro
What do you get for your money then? Apple jazzed up the hardware in the 10.5-inch iPad Pro (which now contains the same electronics as the bigger 12.9-model, incidentally) quite a bit.
Apart from the great new screen, there's the camera from the iPhone 7; that's the single lens and sensor model, rather than the dual imager on the iPhone 7 Plus. It works the same as on the iPhone 7 so I won't talk about it here, but I was wondering what applications could have been enabled with the even better iPhone 7 Plus camera on the iPad Pro with its large screen. Maybe that'll come later.
There's now an A10x system on a chip inside, with a processor ticks a bit quicker at 2.25GHz than the 2.15GHz A9X replaces, and much snappier graphics circuits. The new iPad Pro also gets double the RAM, 4GB compared to 2GB in the previous model.
All the new go-faster stuff makes a big difference. On Geekbench 4, the iPad Pro 10.5-inch is substantially faster than the 9.7-incher: in the single-core test, it managed 3699 as opposed to 2889, and 9130 versus 5081 in the multi-core one.
If it fits your budget and applications, the iPad Pro 10.5-inch is the best general purpose tablet to come out of Apple.
The difference, especially for multi-core, is so large that I ran Geekbench 4 ten times on each device to see if the result is repeatable, and it was. Geekbench 4's compute test using the Metal graphics layer showed similar differences: around 16,950 for the 9.7-inch iPad Pro, and 29,908 for the 10.5-inch tablet.
For graphics, the story was the same: GFBench Metal hit 51 frames per second in the Manhattan 3.1 test on the 10.5-inch iPad Pro. On the 9.7-inch model, the test registered just under 28 frames per second.
That level of processor and graphics performance means games and demanding apps run very well on the iPad Pro 10.5-inch. Apple has gone all out with augmented and virtual reality too, and had to make sure the new iPad Pro could handle those.
It also provides some future-proofing so that you won't need to upgrade to new hardware for the next few years (sorry Apple!).
The main thing missing on the new iPad Pro if you buy it now is the upcoming iOS 11 operating system, which will make the tablet even better.
If you do want to try out the new features before iOS 11 officially comes out, you can head over to Apple's beta site and sign up for the preview programme there.
Don't forget that beta software is work in progress and may behave unexpectedly with applications crashing or not working properly; if that bothers you, wait until iOS 11 is released, and stick with iOS 10.x that the the iPad Pro 10.5-inch comes with.
Best tablet Apple has made
Growing the small iPad Pro to 10.5 inches hasn't made it unwieldy. The new hardware is super quick, the screen is great and yes, the iPad Pro will work as a laptop replacement, perhaps with a third-party clamshell case instead of Apple's Smart Keyboard that doesn't hold the device securely.
If it fits your budget and applications, the iPad Pro 10.5-inch is the best general purpose tablet to come out of Apple.
